I saw an ad in the newspaper today about the return of MAD MEN. One of the best things about that show and other shows I like is the cast (THE OFFICE, RESCUE ME). Someone did a very good job in choosing distinctive and talented actors.
I can think of other TV shows where the cast is not nearly as strong (MONK, for me. Except for the incomparable Tony Shaloub, the rest seem generic and dull. I never felt the cast in CHEERS was especially strong either). Or shows like MY BOYS, where the plethora of male actors seem interchangeable.
What TV show is especially well-cast to you?
How much do you think about your cast in writing? In a short story, the cast is usually very small. I remember in writing classes, people having a snit over having to remember who more than a few people were. So I learned to keep it small.
And I took this idea of small cast with me into my first attempt at a novel. But I think my protagonist in that work would inhabit a small world, being a misanthrope. The second has a bigger cast. It takes place over a lifetime.
Do you think about this much? Do you think, I'd better add a character to provide comic relief. And maybe I need a nosy neighbor or a dog or two. I think I should probably go to a good casting office more often and not just let nature take its course.
Readers: and that's me most of the time. Do you think about the cast in a novel. Does it bother you if it's too large or too small. Too generic.
30 comments:
I think THE CLOSER is well cast. And I really liked the cast in the new remake of STAR TREK (where mis-casting could have led to disaster).
As a reader, my concern with cast size is whether it's appropriate. I can deal with large or small, so long as I can keep track of who's important.
My favorite casts? THE WIRE, and DEADWOOD. James Gandolfini was born to play Tony Soprano, but some of Chae's other casting choices were eccentric, to say the least. (Steven van Zandt as Silvio? Come on.) For older shows, HILL STREET BLUES and ST.ELSEWHERE were well cast.
It's harder for comedies, especially today, when so many of the leads are essentially doing their stand-up routines. SEINFELD was hilarious, but Jerry Seinfeld could barely play himself.
THE CLOSER would have been my next example. And they do a great job of integrating them into the story-lines. Very distinctive actors. Yes, I think THE SOPRANOS made three brilliant choices, Falco, Marchand and Gandolfini-the rest were not nearly as good.
As a reader, yes small or generic casts are a problem. I like lots of people, well defined in few words (too much to ask? ;)
The same is true, I guess, for TV. I like big, diverse, ensemble casts. There are budget issues, there, of course.
And Dana, I didn't mind Little Steven in The Sopranos until the episode where Christopher was late for a meeting and told Tony it was because, "The traffic was terrible, the highways were jammed were jammed with broken heroes."
No, wait, I liked that, too ;)
The Closer and Burn Notice for me are perfectly cast. For reading, short stories and novels both, I like a small cast of characters, I lose track of people quickly and hate going back and forth trying to remember who's who.
What really bites is when writers give the characters similar names. I quit reading Grisham because he was always doing that. The huge cast was bad enough but the similar names made it impossible to keep track.
Yes, similar names drive me crazy. And yet sometimes I find myself doing it. And have to do a find and change function. And then the program changes words that have that syllable in them. I changed the name dan to mickey recently and a lot of words with that sequence of letters then had mickey in the middle of them.
"They liked to go to mickeyances on Saturday nights at the Y."
Ask Word to also look for the space following "Dan," and make sure to leave a space at the end of the replacement name. You'll have to make another pass for possessives, but it's worth the trouble.
Thanks, Dana. You just saved me a heap of trouble.
I like it when the cast has dimension. Cardboard people drive me nuts. Oh, and I really, really hate it when writers (TV or novels) throw in the token dude who's going to die soon.
I like Leverage and Saving Grace for its actors. Sometimes I think us novel writers have it easier, since we control the process completely. For TV/movies, there has to be that chemistry between writing and acting.
I think they made good choices on Star Trek as well. There certainly could have been problems there.
As for television, I don't watch a lot of the shows mentioned. The ones I think have good casting are Dark Blue(the four leads seem perfect to me), Leverage is not bad, and Burn Notice.
On Monk, the only one I never believed was the Captain(good actor, he just doesn't look right for the part).
On the comedy front, I don't watch a lot these days. Fraser had a dead perfect cast. The only recent comedy I like, oddly enough, is Two and A Half Men(and that's not nearly as good as the boy has grown up).
As a writer, I seem to lean toward small groups of characters. I try not to force anything...if there's a Need for levity, adding a whacky character wouldn't be my first choice.
Well-cast television shows include ONCE AND AGAIN, HOMICIDE, ST. ELSEWHERE, THE FORSYTE SAGA, NEW ADVENTURES OF OLD CHRISTINE (for an example of a cast treating with often less-brilliant scripts than the earlier examples). It isn't just my Sela Ward idolatry that suggests that SISTERS with her and Swoosie Kurtz, et al., was a rather undistinguished series with an excellent cast. Good writing, bad cast...few examples come more quickly to mind than BABYLON-5 (a few well-cast roles, but some real hacks in key positions).
I though Dominic Chianese was one of several other excellent performers on THE SOPRANOS. Steve Buscemi did a fine job, too.
ST. ELSEWHERE after the first season, anyway. Losing David Birney always improves a cast.
I love Saving Grace-especially the two women and their relationship.
Fraser had the best writing of any sitcom ever-I thought the women were weaker than the men but maybe the writers were less interested in them. They had so much to work with in the two brothers.
Yes, STAR TREK was very well done. Although again, women were of not much interest to the writers.
I don't even remember David Birney in St. E. A great cast for sure. There was a show that could be sad, creepy, romantic, pithy, self-righteous, informative, realistic, etc.
They should have used Steve Buscemi longer and Junior was very good. You never knew what was really going on in that head.
Deadwood was a great cast as Dana said. As was Rome. I'm a big Richard Russo fan so I was excited when HBO planned an Empire Falls miniseries, but I hated the casting choices and the final product failed to deliver for me.
By the way I have already written a Forgotten book Friday post which will go up at 10:30 central time tonight.
I find the casting on Nip/Tuck to be very interesting. They often have fairly famous actors but use them in unique ways.
The larger the canvas, the larger the cast. For example, Dickens and Tolstoy, when writing novels, had no problems managing huge numbers of characters, and readers could keep track of them without too much difficulty (except those damnable Russian names in War and Peace). Short story writers have always been well-advised to keep the number of characters small. So, as most of television is nothing more substantial than a short story in film script form, the casts must be small, which means the success or failure depends a great deal on the casting. Sometimes--perhaps too often--the great casting can keep marginal scripts alive: think of a few outrageous examples -- DALLAS, GILLIGAN'S ISLAND, and GOLDEN GIRLS.
I didn't watch EMPIRE FALLS for fear of that. Too bad his latest is getting panned. I hate that. Thanks, Travis, I'll put up your link.
NIP/TUCK. Good point. I had to stop watching it but they do cast guest appearances well.
Dickens could have a cast of thousands and give them all a distinct personality as well as a descriptive name to help you remember.
NIP/TUCK's outlandish smartassedness (in all senses) does make it hard to watch...the eventual nature role that Famke Janssen was given was the essential last straw for me, several seasons back. But I did see a bit of Sharon Gless's later role, and they should be giving her a Lot more to do on BURN NOTICE.
Birney did his best to ruin the first season of ST. ELSEWHERE. Brand and Falsey, who created the show, were typically heavy on curdled whimsy, and they and Birney were detached from the series beginning with the seoond season, and it sharply improved (the episode where William Daniels's character decks Birney's was satisfying beyond anything immediately involved with the episode's plot...you can see those episodes on YouTube).
I'll skip the television casting stuff, since I watch so little I have no opinion (there's a first).
In novels, the cast should be simply as large as need be plus one or two for scenery. As a reader, I don't want to spend much time on a character not germane to the plot in some way. I expect there to be a reason OF SOME KIND for the inclusion of that person, even if it's only to carry things along; the car park guy, the coroner's assistant who makes a mistake, the dog that doesn't bark.
In large books, a trilogy say, (I read a lot of fantasy) names are going to be similar, because they are in life. That's okay, but I want a character list up front.
If it's a small cast, that concentrates my attention on what they say and do. I've read terrific short stories with just 2 characters, but I don't think that would work in a novel.
I do hate having too large a cast in a novel, especially in the first chapter or two. I had to stop reading a book recently because it was just a jumble of people and many of them had double lives and ulterior motives which made them even harder to follow. Keep it simple, I say. Unless the language is so outstanding that you can get away with it like Chandler. Notoriously muddled plots. Partly because of large and unruly casts, I think. I also think he gets too easy a pass on that.
I try not to "cast" a book in my head as I read it. I feel like you bring too much of a known actor to a character that way. It is an art form though. People rarely get so worked up over anything as the cast of a movie based on a novel they love. Invariably Hollywood gets it all wrong (to them). I loved the immediate backlash and then loving embrace of the Twilight cast. People were up in arms over Robert Pattison and now he's the most perfect casting choice in history. Ah, fickle teenage girls.
I will commend the casting for Harry Potter. What a daunting task. And one of the most dead-on casting jobs for a novel to film for me was A Simple Plan. I could take or leave Bridget Fonda but Bill Paxton and Billy Bob were spot on.
Funny how sometimes you don't notice a good cast. They make a story come seamlessly to life.
Yes, I think a short story with 2-3 characters works best. Pulling it off in a novel turns out to be quite hard.
Love the character list. It has kept me reading more than one novel. Especially family sagas with relationships to sort out. Like The GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO recently.
Not a big watcher of BURN NOTICE but what I have seen mostly features Sharon Gless smoking and whining. When I think of the depth of her performance in CAGNEY AND LACEY, it's a shame.
Casting William Daniels as Dr. Craig was inspired. I have never seen anything better than the scene in the attic of his house after his son was killed, where he remembers reading GREEN EGGS AND HAM to him as a child. Beautiful.
A crank, and a smart one, is all the more credible in scenes like that.
I think the main thing about having a good over all cast is not having a STAR in the mix that you are going to focus on. One of the things about a show like The Wire, Deadwood or Wonderfalls (all of which I think were well cast)is that you had actors who were not coming in with the baggage of their past roles. The other thing is the writers have to give time to and put the spot light on the rest of the cast as the show goes on.
Good point. If I have a criticism of RESCUE ME it's that we spent too much time with Denis Leary, watching him froth over females.
When I pen something with specific characterization I never really think about who or how many but rather what do I need to do to get the action committed that I want performed. Once I get that part out I go back and cast someone in real life into the role and rewrite it tailored to what I perceive as their personality.
Does that make sense?
And, belatedly, I'd say CHEERS was worse-written than acted, always going for the easy laugh. FRASIER when it was good was better (though I thought Woody H. did a pretty good job on CHEERS, even if that was a role playing directly toward his strength).
Post a Comment